Friday, April 18, 2014

The Finished Master Bedroom

I just realized that I never posted pics of the master bedroom after we finished it. It's been busy here and I've had other things that I've been trying to do , like get ready to register for a craft fair and stuff like that. I was going to start this post with a demo pic from the master bedroom, but then I remembered that I had a pic from waaaay back, like when we bought the house back, so I thought I'd share that just to let you get a sense of where we came from.
So here's what the master bedroom looked like when we bought the house. Green walls and all that floral wallpaper glory. I'll just pause a moment while you take all that in. Go ahead, I'll wait. You good? Great, moving on. So we actually removed that border and left the walls that green for a while. The very first thing I did in the house was to remove wallpaper, even if I didn't do anything else to the room, I just want to put that out there. So our room was probably one of the last to get any attention and when we got to it we decided that we wanted to do something a little different than what we had going on in the rest of the house. That was before we had four kids so a little chaos in the house didn't seem to be a bad thing. Each room was a different color, some of them crazy colors, some had stripes painted on them. We look back at some of that as an "it seemed like a good idea at the time" kind of thing. We kind of feel that way about the faux brick paneling that we put up in the master. We really liked it at the time, it gave sort of an urban loft like vibe that was different from the rest of the house so it made it sort of an escape because the feel of that room was so different. But, as time went on we discovered that the kids provided enough chaos and the house needed to be taken back to a more neutral feel, so we slowly began to go from interesting colors to more soothing ones, and not only that but we let those colors just extend from one room to the next for a calmer feel. We're not back to "builder beige", but we are definitely digging the "coffee and latte" thing we have going on. The best part is that if the paint in the main parts of the house get messed up, we only have to deal with two different paint buckets, winning! So anyway, here's an after shot of the master bedroom. We still sadly haven't made it to IKEA to get our bed (though I did get a new quilt and the shams that I embroidered/monogrammed last year are a nice touch), so there's not much going on on that wall, but there will be eventually. The paint color may seem familiar, and that's because it's the same color from the living room and hallway. We bought a five gallon bucket of that paint because it was cheaper than three one gallon cans and that choice has served us well. Neutral, that's what we're going for these days. Incidentally, the master bath is painted the same color as the kitchen. So  you may notice that we added some upgrades when we repainted. We put in a new ceiling fan that doesn't wobble and flicker and try to kill us in our sleep, and we switched out the outlets and switches to the sleek square ones like we used in the bathroom, and we added crown molding! We had never installed it before, but it meant that we'd get to buy a new toy tool toy that we'd been eying. Say hello to our new friend, the compound miter saw-------------------------->
Nice, huh? We also got that little blue jig thing there on the saw. That's a Kreg Crown Pro and it's supposed to help you cut the crown with less hassle but we found it to generally be a hassle so we just cut the crown without it. We think that when we eventually get to installing the crown in the rest of the house we'll study it a bit more and maybe not have the same issues. Anyway, we think that the crown is a nice upgrade and adds just what the room really needed to finally grow up. A quick word on crown molding: the difference in an ok crown job and a pretty good one isn't perfect cuts, it's caulk! Your wall and ceiling aren't going to be perfect, but once you add a little caulk to hide those little dips, they just disappear like the money in my wallet when I'm in Joann. So anyway, we re-purposed the shelf from the bathroom by using it to hold our t.v., and I solved the issue of the "dirty but still clean" clothing issue by installing hook units beside the closets. One for me, and one for him, though his clothes oddly enough usually end up on the floor beside his side of the bed anyway even though the hook thing is right there!! I think it's a boy thing since the boys also do this.
I just overlook it and hang his clothes up when I go by. These hooks are also great for parking your pajamas so that you can easily find them, and for holding the jacket that you frequently need because the weather here is on crack or something. I like them because they functionally take up wall space. They look cool when they are empty, but honestly I think they are kind of neat even with clothes hanging on them. It's a lot neater than a miscellaneous pile of clothes in the floor, or on the chair, or on the treadmill, or just pitched on the bed. We are really digging the new master suite. It's grown up and upgraded and finished feeling. It really does feel like we're in a hotel every single night, which is pretty awesome. The kids generally aren't allowed in our room but occasionally one will stumble in for something. The other day Colin needed a bandaid so I invited him in while I patched him up. He stood in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom with this wide eyed look on his face while looking back and forth between the two rooms. I just kinda watched him to see what fantastic nugget of information would come out of his mouth. Sure enough, after a few times looking back and forth he said "Wow, it's really nice in here! This is really nice, it's like a hotel or something! Did you guys do all this yourselves because it's really nice! It's like we're rich or something!" I just kinda chuckled and told him that we did it all ourselves and that eventually the rest of the house would catch up and for him to try not to destroy it when that happened. Those kids, they say the darndest things, and sometimes it's even true. ~Kellie~